Barbados PM: climate action will benefit US

Mia Amor Mottley, the climate champion prime minister of Barbados, has invited Donald Trump to a face-to-face meeting where she would seek "common ground" and persuade him that climate action was in his own interests.

- Fiona Harvey Baku

"Let us find a common purpose in saving the planet and saving livelihoods," she told the Guardian at the UN's Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan. "We are human beings and we have the capacity to meet face to face, in spite of our differences. We want humanity to survive. And the evidence [of the climate crisis] we are seeing almost weekly now."

Only by personal meetings among world leaders can the massive changes needed on climate action be achieved, she believes. "President Trump has been very clear about the importance of that kind of face-to-face conversation in the things that he believes he can solve."

Mottley, who in 2021 took Barbados out of the Commonwealth realm to be a republic, has been an electrifying presence at UN climate summits since she took the stage at Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021 with an impassioned speech demanding that world leaders "try harder" to avoid passing a death sentence on her country.

Since then, she has gained a global reputation as a formidable champion of the developing countries most afflicted by climate breakdown.

She has also led a movement among developing and some developed countries to change the global financial system, to generate the funds needed to shift the world to a low-carbon economy.

The reelection of Trump has thrown a deep shadow over Cop29, which kicked off on Monday. Scores of world leaders flew in for the summit, but the heads of government of most of the world's biggest economies stayed away.

Delegates fear Trump will withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, dismantle regulations and climate targets, and push forward with plans to "drill, baby, drill" for more fossil fuels.

Scientists have warned that if he follows through on his campaign promises the world has little hope of limiting global heating to 1.5C above preindustrial temperatures.